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Get paid faster with Payment Services!

Wouldn’t it be great if something happened that improved your cashflow and reduced the amount of time you had to spend processing payments? You bet it would, which is why the release of Payment Services is such great news!

Once you’ve signed up with one of the supported payment services, your customers will be able to pay you immediately when they receive an online invoice – they simply click the Pay Now button, enter their credit card details and voila – you’re paid!

And it gets even better. Not only will the money be shooting its way into your bank account but we will automatically create the payment in Xero ready for you to reconcile as soon as the transaction appears in your bank feed. Magic.

Check out how it works in this short video.

To make use of Payment Services you need to sign up with one of the following supported payment services.

When you sign up you nominate which bank account you would like payments to be deposited into and will be given the details you need to hook the payment service up to Xero.

If you don’t have a merchant account set up to use with any of these providers, but occasionally wish to receive credit card payments, you can use the existing integration with PayPal to accept these. This is handy, for example, if you have a holiday home that you hire out now and then and people wish to pay for this via credit card. You can read the details on setting up payment services on this page in our Help Center.

We’ve also added a couple of enhancements in response to feedback we had on invoice settings and bank reconciliation.

New invoice settings to control how tax subtotals are grouped and what information is displayed on foreign exchange invoices

If you’ve been missing the ability to undo a bulk Mark as Reconciled action, you’ll be glad to hear this is now back (and if you don’t know what I’m talking about – don’t worry, you probably don’t need it!)

We’re still working on a number of other cool features and enhancements, including:

Email settings – a popular request on Community, you will be able to control how emails are sent from Xero. This work is all but ready and is scheduled to go out in about 3 week’s time.

Taxable Payment Annual Report – this one’s for the Aussies and will allow those in the building industry to comply with the ATO’s new reporting standards – will be released before the end of June.

Purchase orders – it’s taking a while but, as always, we think it’s worth doing properly. We’re going as fast as we can and will know more about when it’s likely to ship over the next few weeks.

Enjoy the new features and look forward to more rolling out over the coming months.

100 comments

We were able to integrate online invoice payments through our website within an hour of this new release. The custom payment link makes it possible. Great release!
The only question I have is what the ShortCode is for. I could not find any documentation about that.

Fantastic. This is really powerful. I’m going to set up an invoice theme for customers who I want to pay in advance and add an online payment service to their invoices. Excellent.
You’re killing me with the Purchase Orders. I’ve been eagerly awaiting each release since it featured in ‘coming soon’ almost 6 months ago and holding off an integration project. Luckily I’m confident it will be great. My expectations are high!

yipppeee … bulk mark as reconciled is back – best present ever! (Xero rebuilds all over the place)
thanks Andrew, waiting VERY patiently for PO’s … no holding back converting MYOB’s over once that baby is in!

Do I need to setup an account with DPS in order to use DPS? I have an account with Paypal and I know how that works, but I was wondering if DPS is different or how it works. I am also curious about the cost.

For Paypal, it is nice for my customers, but it costs me a significant amount in time and transaction costs. DPS might be easier. Please let me know.

Great work guys! What I have always wanted is an option to charge an additional fee if the client chooses to pay online. Can you please add this? For example, if they choose to pay via PayPal, instead of a bank transfer, I would like to add the PayPal fee. This allows them to use their card if they wish, because many clients accrue points for using a credit card, but it’s not fair on us as we lose a few percent.

@Andrew – I believe it should be “E-commerce – DPS hosted (PX Pay)” but this is really something you should check with DPS themselves. Other options could equally work and be more appropriate. They do say to select “Unsure” if you’re not sure and that they will be in touch (unfortunately there is no Unsure option – awkward).

@Andrew re DPS account choices; I’d hazard a guess it’s ‘ecommerce – DPS Hosted’ – you essentially want to hand off the credit card processing to DPS without having to set anything up yourself. Happy to be corrected by Tokes.

+1 on the ability to add in the percentage so the client pays for the privilege of using their credit card rather than us – some of the stuff we sell has a lower margin on it than the credit card processing fees unfortunately!

I’ve been hoping for the DPS integration for years – we’ve used it on applications we’ve developed for client website (usually PXPay, sometimes self hosted and it’s fantastic).

Since this was announced at XeroCon i’ve been trying to get our bank (ASB) to set us up as a merchant in preparation for this – they still haven’t so I’ve just flicked another email to them referencing this release. I suggested since they sponsored XeroCon and recommend Xero, and supposedly Xero and ASB have a “close relationship”(what with ‘first to offer bank feeds’ and all that historical stuff), they should know what’s going on and might want to get their finger out. Sadly they are still struggling with the fact I can’t show them where on my website the card numbers will be acquired for this service *rolls eyes*.

@Tej Patel or @Andrew Tokeley – any way you could give their compliance team a nudge?

Not quite there yet – trying to setup DPS. we have an existing account. Error comes up when clicking on invoice link as “Unfortunately we can’t find that bill” – looks like an invalid key. What is the key if not DPS password ?

A few people have been asking about better ways of passing on credit card charges to customers. Certainly something we could consider (i.e. when the payment service is set up you could specify a percentage/flat fee to add to the invoice upon payment). This isn’t something we are actively working on at the moment, but it would be great to get feedback through community voting to gauge the demand for this https://community.xero.com/business/discussion/88861

@Josh, the key required is not your dps password, if you contact DPS sales@paymentexpress.com they can help you setup the key you will need. This is free for a limited time for existing DPS customers, so shouldn’t cost anything to enable.

@Warren Sheppard, thanks for the feedback, DPS will discuss with ASB to ensure their compliance team is aware.

Andrew. Re DPS, I agree, once you add the monthly fee plus the banks Merchant fees the whole thing wont be any better than Paypal. At least Paypal charge nothing for no transactions, and there is no Merchant fee on top. I still mave my mobile EFT machine that I can use for customer payments by phone. Eway is no better, a SMB cops $399 per year for just 5 Transactions, then per transaction after that. The first 5 cost over $6.00 each Plus Merchant fees.

Debitsuccess provides gateways for both Direct Debit and Credit Card with the ability to forward the charge onto the purchaser. Who do we talk to about an integration solution for our customers using Xero?

@Andrew at Xero. Andrew just looking at the Invoice the images on it, wondering if there is a way to only select with gateways we have. eg: Visa, MasterCard. our DPS gateway dosnt support “American Express & Discover”

Excellent news. We will be setting ours up with the GoCardless nesxt week! Any advice on the way we should set it up would be greatly appreciated? We will just follow the process, it looks good with instant free setup though

Also, many of my customer have difficulty to pay with paypal when they don’t have a paypal account. They received an obscur message “The card you entered cannot be used for this payment. Please enter a different credit or debit card number.”

This is great news … however your API that returns invoice data really needs to include the public (non-login needed) url to the view invoice page. Our users should not have to login to both my app and yours to view an invoice and pay it. Please include this field in your API. It would make a HUGE difference for us.

We currently use DPS to take automatic recurring subscription payments from customers. Therefore customers don’t manually pay via the invoice. However, at present we manually import the individual DPS transactions into Xero and reconcile them against the lump sum that comes into our bank account from DPS. Will this DPS integration lead to a direct feed of DPS transaction data into Xero? From my reading of the new help doc it seems that the reconciliation takes place per invoice when paid via the invoice.

Thank you for this. I can’t find documentation for the invoice formatting changes relating to tax subtotals. Are there examples on your help site? And can I show tax per line yet, without having to create a .docx invoice?

Fantastic step in the right direction and thanks to all who put a lot of work into this Payment Services launch.

It would be awesome if recurring payments could be created and applied against recurring invoices. I know a lot of customers who would willingly shut down accounts with other providers if this was an option (sometimes saving $30-$70/mth).

Very straight forward to add. We started using Pay Pal for online credit card transactions a month or so ago, however, we had to send a payment request and some customers got confused thinking they needed a PayPal account.
This is perfect as it means we can get paid without the fuss. Our PayPal charges are not cheap, however, you can withdraw funds INSTANTLY!

Great to see the development continuing.
On the payment front is there any work going into BPay for my Australian clients. A common form of payment here but one not currently supported by xero.
Keep up the good work!

Andrew, so glad to see Xero has integrated with Stripe! Thank you! Like other Saas companies, we set up reoccurring payments with customers, (rather than invoicing each month) and charge for overage through Stripe. Is it likely that this will also included as part of the integration at a later date?

@Ross, @Will, @MarkBerghan – we will be deciding which new Payment Services to add moving forward by customer demand, so the best thing to do is to head on over to http://community.xero.com, set up a Feature Request, and gather some votes.

@Doesjka – no, we won’t be auto-reconciling the payments. Mainly because of the challenges in getting it right 100% of the time and the pain of getting it wrong and not necessarily knowing about it until it’s too late.

The reconciliation process is made trickier because the different ways Payment Services apply their fees. Some will deduct the fee from each transaction, while others may aggregate the fees into a lump sum – this means that invoice payments in Xero may not add up exactly with the amount deposited into your account by the payment service.

Would be great to see Dwolla integration as well! I know they don’t do credit cards, but they are quick and easy way to pay for clients. Can’t argue with a microscopic fee of only 25 cents per transaction (no percentages added!).

I need to be able to do subscription billing… recurring invoices that are auto-paid with stripe. When is that coming? I can do it today with freshbooks and integrate with xero but that seems silly, doesn’t it.

eWAY is looking fwd in making it EASY for business to take payments via their invoices.
Please see http://www.eway.com.au/xero for some great news and offers for XERO customers. Cheers Matt Bullock CEO eWAY

@Peter – the only invoice we show in the video is an online invoice (http://help.xero.com/#OnlineInvoices) and was the result of a standard theme – you can send your customers an online invoice by selecting this option on the send dialog in Xero.

If you want more control over the PDF version of an invoice then create a new DOCX invoice theme, the default invoice template will be pretty close to the standard theme output and is a good place to start making incremental updates. You can also have a look at the demo version of Xero and see what customised templates they have there.

We’ve just set up DPS and it works well. It’s slightly different to the video above in that it takes our customer to the ugly DPS credit card details input screen. Is it possible to do this in Xero like the Video?

Thanks Andrew,
Which payment providers appear to stay in the Xero website throughout the payment process like in the video?
At the moment we direct our customers to Xero online invoicing then they get sent to 3rd party to enter credit card details and I’m just worried about trust issues having to explain all the parties involved to our customers. (plus it’s an ugly screen)
The process in the video looks much better than our setup.

Hi, Please default DPS gateway for repeating transactions to ‘yes’ (Currently set to ‘no’) in order to enable setting up monthly payments in the money user panel. No point having recurring invoices as a feature when you can’t set up recurring payments. Should literally be a 5 minute fix.

I hope Xero starts supporting BitPay or coinbase in the future. I’m tired of paying 3% for accepting credit card payments. Lets move to bitcoin to save 2% and get paid instantly. They pay via ACH the following day just like a credit card merchant service provider and its less expensive. The payments also come without a fear of chargeback of fraud. Not that my customers would be paying invoices with stolen credit cards, but you never know when their debit card might get bounced.

@Matt Bullock I can’t speak for my Aussie SBO counterparts, but for me, it is huge. We should not have to eat a 2.9% transaction fee impacting our cash flow just for the privilege of offering a faster payment alternative to our customers. If they want to take advantage of CC/DC payment options, they should have to carry, or at the very least, share the financial burden of doing so.

@Matt Sebastionelli and @Felipe in the absence of Xero supporting surcharges, eWAY have developed our own payment integration with them which does support setting surcharges on a per card type basis. Get in contact for more info.

Would be lovely to get Surcharges working on Xero when selecting payment.
Seems ridiculous that eWay has had to create a workaround… Any chance DPS might do the same until Xero works out how to get it sorted?